USDA moving too fast on chicken?

The Department of Agriculture needs to hit the brakes on its plan to allow poultry plants to speed production lines by 25 percent while replacing government inspectors with plant employees, a congressional report advises.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office, the research arm of Congress, says in a not-yet-published report that the USDA hasn’t done enough yet to address food safety-related concerns related to its proposed expansion of its HACCP-based Inspections Models Project, or “HIMP.”

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The new report, a draft copy of which was obtained by POLITICO, is based on an audit that took place between September 2012 and August 2013 and is addressed to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), chairwoman of the Senate subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy, Poultry, Marketing and Agriculture Security. It claims that the department’s evaluation of food safety and quality performance standards was too limited because it used a snapshot of data rather than data collected from the pilot plants for the majority of the 15 years the program has been in place.

The audit results follow the 175,000 comments the USDA received from stakeholders in response to the proposed ruling, many of which express similar concerns. One of the loudest opponents to the change has been Food and Water Watch, a consumer advocacy group.

The USDA proposal aims to reduce the number of government inspectors on poultry production lines from up to four to one and speed the number of birds that go by from 140 per minute to 175, observes Tony Corbo, a Food & Water Watch lobbyist, echoing a line in the GAO report.

“It’s just too fast for them,” Corbo says.

That’s also the feeling of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Atlanta-based worker advocacy group that interviewed more than 300 poultry workers at poultry plants participating in pilot programs where line speeds were accelerated. It reported finding that 78 percent of the workers believed their jobs were made less safe. The group filed a 72-page petition Tuesday with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to issue a mandatory standard regulating work speeds on production lines in meatpacking and poultry industries.

HIMP has been a contentious issue for years, with unions expressing concern over the loss of jobs and worker safety and consumer advocacy groups pointing to potential food safety concerns.

As of July 2013, 29 plants – 19 for slaughtering chicken, five for young turkey and five for hogs — were participating in the USDA’s pilot progam, which began in 1998.

USDA officials repeatedly have said that removing inspectors from production lines will actually increase food safety by allowing the inspectors to focus solely on the dangers of food contamination, while assigning less important, quality issues to paid plant employees.

“By revising current procedures and removing outdated regulatory requirements that do not help combat foodborne illness, the result will be a more efficient and effective use of taxpayers dollars,” USDA Under Secretary for Food Safety Elisabeth Hagen says in a written response to the report.

Hagen says in the letter that the USDA intends to move forward with plans to finalize the rule and promises that it will demonstrate that it adequately compiled evidence showing that it will be safe to speed up poultry production lines with fewer government inspectors.

When it issues the final rule, [FSIS] will present the updated analyses, including the cost-benefit analysis, in a manner that will facilitate public understanding of the information used to support the rulemaking,” Hagen promises.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has previously spoken in favor of expanding the program as well. At a spring hearing held by the House’s appropriations FDA-USDA subcommittee, Vilsack noted that poultry inspection has not changed in 50 or 60 years.” He estimated that expanding the program would save the department about $90 million in just the first three years while allowing the poultry industry to be more profitable.

It’s not just USDA’s opinion that food safety will not suffer under the proposal.

The department notes how it contracted a third party made up from specialists across the country to validate its conclusions in 2002. The National Alliance for Food Safety Technical Team, made up of officials from University of Arkansas, Texas A&M University and Auburn University, said that, overall, USDA’s proposal compared favorably to the traditional system of inspection with regard to meaningful parameters to consumers of poultry and poultry products.

Also, despite the GAO’s concerns, the National Chicken Council is standing by the safety records of HIMP plants.

“We look forward to reviewing the report in its entirety,” says Tom Super, an NCC spokesman. “We stand by the worker safety and food safety records of these plants over the past 14 years. Salmonella and Campylobacter prevalence rates are at all time lows, and the poultry industry has come together to reduce our worker illness and injury rate 75 percent from two decades ago.”